Anyhow, have a look at this virtual HR office solution developed for Deloitte: http://www.estufuturo.es

BR,
Miguel

1. If the presenter and the content are compelling, audiences will pay attention. If they’re not paying attention, it’s not about the where they are sitting.

2. If the presenter is letting the audience ask questions and interact, it also makes no difference whether you are in the room, or you are online.

Just my two cents.

Tom Rielly
TED Conference

Second, media companies have multiple issues. First, they have a sales staff, in many cases over 40, who just “don’t get interactive”, so they won’t sell it.

Second, they panned intereactive back in the late 90’s early 2000’s as a flash in the pan with no future. Shortsighted but true.

Now that revenues are down, it’s even harder for media companies to invest the dollars required to be competitive on an interactive scale.

As for events, I see online working for smaller events, by this I mean less than 200 attendees. People attend events for the networking. In many cases it’s like a reunion of sorts.

I do see events like training etc taking off, but I am not even sure sales meetings etc will flourish. I do not see this works for evetns with a big trade shwo component. I see related online activities helping put buyers and sellers together, but not replacing the show.

I am most interested to see how the Hotel and Travel Industry position events as we move through this economy and move forward.

Thanks for starting the blog!

Information retrieval and computation are what computers are good at. While social interaction has improved dramatically since web2.0, it still does not compare to person-person.

So, that leads us back to events. While there will be a growing need for virtual events just like there is for e-retailing, they will never take the complete place of in-person events.

Hopefully, in-person events will take on a virtual component so that the in person time can be put to maximum use for person-to-person interactions.

See the following blog posts for more discussion
Part 1 – http://swanthinks.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/future-conferences-part-1/
Part 2 – http://swanthinks.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/future-conferences-part-2/

You have drawn interesting parallels and raised very important questions.

Retailers seem to have succeeded in stopping the audiences half-way (on their way out) by adapting to the audiences’ changing habits. Print-publishers, on the other hand, seem to be failing to adapt fast enough to the needs of their readers. A simple example is the digital magazines that simulate the turning of a page. Anyone who has tried to read these digital versions on a computer will agree that they are difficult, if not impossible to read and navigate at length. It might serve the publishing industry well to join hands and invest in or partner with others creating technology and infrastructure for a standardized e-reader – one that they can give away for free, because utimately it is quality content that readers will pay for.

The event industry is a victim of its historical success and huge returns. The events industry has so far followed in the path of the publishers – by putting the needs of the exhibitors and sponsors above the needs and changing tastes of their audiences. Anyone who has tried to plan a visit to a trade show by going to an online complement knows what I am talking about. In their rush to be where the exhibitors are going, the events industry has focused on tools aimed at selling booths. When I see online floor plans with a print option, I doubt any attendee uses them. Tools for steering visitors into a convention center and along the aisles do not seem to be the focus of the events industry. I would urge the events industry thought-leaders to challenge the status quo on how audiences are treated, and call for better tools to help audiences ‘choreograph’ their time on the trade show floor. Imagine being able to plan your visit to a tactile trade show using something like a Google Street View – say a Google Aisle View of every trade show floor! If the events industry wants to grow audiences in tactile events once the economy picks up and once travel budgets thaw, then they really need to pay attention to the attendees’ needs, and be where they are.